Did You Fall Or Fail?

If you want to learn how to roller skate, you might want to first learn how to fall. Babies do it when learning how to walk, but that's not what their proud parents and relatives say.

"Junior learned how to walk! Just look at him!"

Jamal and Jamika took a lot of falls before they got the hang of walking, and they'll take a lot more learning how to run.

Falling does not equate failure when the rules are fair. Putting those little ones on a tightrope and expecting them to learn how to walk and run there defies the odds of success.

Such is the case of your chances of succeeding when the game is not fair and the odds are stacked against you.

You fell, but did you fail?

Let's look at education. In many urban areas, the dropout rate is over 50%. Did those students fail because they're too dumb to learn, or because the materials were inadequate and/or boring, the classes overcrowded, the athletic policy for who can play ball too strict, and the community so impoverished that the one or both parents in the home are too stressed to spend time helping with homework after they get home from they low wage job where they stood on their feet and sucked up to whoever to keep that job?

Speaking of jobs, let's touch on career. Women still earn less than what men do, and workplace discrimination against blacks, Latinos and some other minorities hasn't gone anywhere. Unless you have a "white-sounding" name, you have a 50% chance of not even getting the interview.

While both sexes need the ability to be financially independent, it also impacts on a man's comfortable zone in providing as a husband. Is it small wonder that fewer men propose marriage?

This leads into love. Do you want to be in a loving and sexually exclusive, long term relationship, but feel like a failure because you aren't, and haven't found anyone interested in being with you on those terms in a very long time?

What about the stats that show 70% of black kids are born to unwed mothers, or that the percentage of blacks who get married are very small? Between 1950 and 2000, the percentage of never-married black women doubled, from 20% to 42%. I'll bet that after the Census collects data next month and releases it next year, it'll be a helluva lot higher. It already is in some areas, so high that kids in one article told their teacher that "marriage is for white people".

Thus, if you're on that hamster wheel of endless dating and being or having "just a friend with benefits", and beating yourself up over why you can't seem to connect, have you legitimately fallen in your goal, like a baby falls when learning to walk?

I'll put it this way: you're not likely to find water on a desert, so don't curse yourself because you're thirsty. You haven't failed; the dating game has failed you, compounded by the social changes in the past half century and even the last decade.

For example, people who marry before their age 21 are often viewed as foolish and impulsive, and the young are encouraged to do anything except marry, i.e., go to college, work or the military.

Yet, our biology, late adolescent and young adult sexuality won't wait for us to get hitched before giving in to our sexual appetite. Finding a virgin after age 18 or 19 is rarity, and abstinence is a huge struggle that most people cannot do when they have choices to do otherwise.

I haven't found the statistic matching what I read, but it feels intuitively true: the more sex partners a woman has, the lower her odds of getting married. The reasons may be:

-The older you get, the more set in your ways you get, and the more relationships and sexual flings people have had tends to make them a little more cautious, suspicious or even jaded

- The old double standard what men can do and what women shouldn't do,

- Over two million people are incarcerated, and most of them are men, and most of them have little education which ties into the first example. While they yearn for the company of a woman, they have none, and that's well over a million women who might have a man if so many weren't locked up - over half for non-violent crimes, common in poverty.

- For whatever reason, more men than women are gay,

- Men die while fighting wars. The number of women who do is negligible when comparing. For the 5,300+ men who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, that's 5,300 women who won't have a partner. In Vietnam, over 58,000 men died. That's a lot of good loving for a lot of women - and the men who died - that got wasted on war. Take note, none of those fatalities count the enormous number of men who returned severely impaired, disabled, or committed suicide.

- (Addendum) See Brownbelle's great theory in her comment after this post for another reason.


In an alternative universe where people walk only on tight ropes, the baby who cannot learn how to walk is considered handicapped. Parts of our daily world has become like this.

The next time you think you failed, regardless of your gender, ask yourself whom the failure belonged to. While I'm all for taking responsibility for one's actions, it might not be you.

Then get up, and try to find another place to walk.